33 The Girls of Summer, Katie Bishop (RWYO)
A freebie from Amazon First Reads at some point I think. Imagine Alex Garland's The Beach, except set on Jeffrey Epstein's Island. Backpacker Rachel is a naive 17yo when she spends the summer Island hopping around Greece. After befriending a group of girls on the ferry, she decides to stay put in one idyllic spot for her last few weeks. She meets a boy (except he's not a boy, he's older, and asks her to keep their relationship secret), gets offered a bar job, cancels her flight home and from there is increasingly drawn into a seedy world of dates and parties with rich older men. This story is interspersed with chapters showing the older Rachel, unhappily married, trying to come to terms with what happened to her as a teenager.
The dual timeline is kind of a cliche, and the use of language can be clunky and awkward. However I thought this was well-plotted and paced, and made for an engaging (if depressing) sunlounger read.
34 To Exist as I Am: A Doctor's Notes on Recovery and Radical Acceptance, Grace Spence Green
Grace Spence Green is a doctor and a disability activist. In her early 20s, when she was a medical student, she was badly injured when a man fell (or jumped?) from a high balcony in a shopping centre, landing on her and breaking her spine. Since then she has been unable to walk, and has varying levels of control over her body below the chest.
This is Grace's memoir of her rehabilitation and her experiences learning to navigate the world as a disabled person. She is not angry about her accident, and she's isn't really angry about losing her ability to walk - she's angry about how little the world values disabled people, and how hard it can be to live a normal life in a body that is not seen as "normal".
This was certainly a very thought-provoking and valuable book. It made me think a lot, although I didn't always agree with it. Spence Green can be contradictory - but then, can't we all? She's not claiming to be perfectly rational any more than any non-disabled person - sometimes we all want things that are both valuable but which don't fit together perfectly. She is a strong and articulate advocate for disability rights and for the importance of seeing people as individuals and not just for the ways in which they conform, or fail to conform, to society's expectations. I can think of several people who am planning to buy a copy of this book
35 The Dream Hotel, Laila Lalami
Loved this, a bold for me. A near-future dystopia, which feels so close to our own world that you can almost reach out and touch it.
Sara, an archivist at the Getty Museum in LA and the exhausted mother of young twins, is flying back from a work trip to London when she is stopped an Immigration. She expects things to be cleared up quickly - after all, she has a clean record and has done nothing wrong - but we, the readers, already know that's not how things are going to turn out, as we have already seen Sara as a resident (NOT an inmate) at a retention centre (NOT a prison or jail).
You haven't been convicted, you're not serving time. You're being held until your forensic observation is complete. How much longer, someone will always ask. Depends, the attendants say.
Sara has been flagged by a system set up by the US Government in the wake of an horrific mass shooting. Citizens' data, across multiple sources, is being collated and analysed to identify those at risk of committing a crime. Everyone has a risk score, which can go up and down. Once your score goes past a certain threshold, you are taken to a retention centre for testing and observation. For how long? Depends.
This is just the kind of book that I love - gripping to read but smart and full of ideas. It feels grounded with Sara and her story, but touches on so many troubling things that reflect back what's happening in our society right now. The collection of our data by big tech and governments, of course, and the possible implications of that. The dehumanising effect of incarceration. The (perhaps unintended) consequences of outsourcing services such as running jails and incentivising companies to make money from the pain of vulnerable people. The way that all of the above can intersect with gender, with race, with other things that make us vulnerable, even in the face of "fair" "impartial" systems.
In the retention centre library, the residents can read old battered books sent from closed schools and public libraries. Sara reads Kafka as she tries to navigate deliberately complex administrative systems and rules that are poorly explained and inconsistently applied. But Lalami isn't a stupid writer, and she doesn't hit you around the head with the parallels - as I've said above, she's written this book which is clearly a polemic about societal issues but also managed successfully to make it one woman's story, so that we don't feel lectured to or harangued, but rather like we are travelling along with Sara through this painful experience. There's humour, and a lightness of touch too, which stops it from feeling too dark and heavy.
My only criticism of this book was that it ended rather abruptly. I don't mind unresolved plot points and loose strands (and there are plenty of these) but I do like to a bit of a change of pace towards the end, a few signposts that the book is approaching its conclusion. This one kind of careers forward then slams on the brakes.